December 3, 2008

There now, it's extinct! The white possum of the Daintree Rainforest, Queensland, Australia. Aren't you ashamed? Gone, gone, gone forever. Never to return. Because you drove a car, you heated a house, you breathed, you bastard.

Anyway, like our middle class and our way of life, it will be good to finally be rid of all those damned plants and animals. Maybe once they're all extinct and America is a 3rd world hell hole, the stupid libs will shut their mouths! (Not likely!)

Having learned a bit about how this stuff gets put out there - I would LOVE to know the ORIGINS of this story - funny how it just HAPPENS to be SUCH a CUTE little critter... one we would love to have as pets! What a great image for a campaign!

State of fear, Man. PR firms, Graphics Depts and Think Tanks.

And since the article says it thrives in the COOLER regions, if the recent reports of global COOLING continue, how does THAT figure in?

No matter. I'm sure the White Possum will bring in megamillions to offset the declining grant revenues for the activist crowd.

If you go to the Fox article then Google the actual name - "lemuroid ringtail possum" you find that the SPECIES is in a near-threatened category (meaning not anywhere near endangered). The white variety is not a separate species, just a different variety with a with coat genetically passed on. Sort of like saying the German cockroaches found in China with spots on them may die off, but the trillion other cockroaches of the same species go on. Neither humans nor cockroaches would ever miss a subpopulation of the species.

No doubt that the article prompted thousands of emotionally disturbed women and male environmentalists in touch with their feminine side into hours of bitter weeping and lamentations for "poor little gone for ever, adorable, cuddly Snowcups".

For that wailing alone, the article is worth it.

Meanwhile, in further evidence of global warming, my neighbor noted he had more algea scum in his pool this year...

One of the very serious fundamental problems in the study of extinction is that our ability to identify new species and thus our ability to detect extinction has grown at a geometric rate up to the present day. This makes it difficult to generate data on extinction that isn't skewed or biased.

C4 has it right. That cute little light-colored guy is an example of Hemibelideus lemuroids f. typica. There are still many dark-colored ones in Australia known as Hemibelideus lemuroids f. carbonaria.

Both light and dark possums used to flourish in England but then along came the Industrial Revolution with its soot and pollution. The trees became darkened and members of the light colored variety were easily spotted by Ignancious J. Featherbottom, Esquire, the inventor of the cat toy. The furry thing on a string on a stick made him rich.

The dark variety still lives on and many have found employment in London’s financial district as bootblacks, affecting a hokey Cockney accent because it’s more fun that way.

Even if this conveniently cute and furry little animal is extinct it is most unlikely that climate change was to blame. Andrew Bolt from the Herald Sun has made a career of debunking this sort of nonsense. He does so again here: http://blogs.news.com.au/heraldsun/andrewbolt/index.php/heraldsun/comments/possums_not_fried/

When I see this my first thought is to shout "Adapt or Die - Darwin does work". My second is to wonder how much of a carbon footprint these had. Who gets those credits? I'm sure the government will fund research to study this. Millions to be spent on something to be published and then promptly ignored.

I'm sorry. But how on Gaia can you possibly rule everything else out - invading species, disease, etc. Most of these type scare-mongering stories that declare something disappearing due to GW, inevitably turn out to be a virus or loss of habitat. Best example, FROGS!

Global warming and global cooling is part of the natural cycle of the earth. Personally.....I'll take the warming over cooling. Plants will grow better, larger and more productively in a global warming scenario, instead of being shriveled by cold.

Steve Williams is forgetting the Irish Elk, and several cold-adapted species (possibly including the cold-adapted subspecies of Homo Sapiens we call Neanderthal Man) that died out at the end of the last ice age.

Also, of course, the Viking colonies on Greenland went extinct due to global cooling when Greenland could no longer support farming by medieval technology.

3000 feet surely isn't high enough for year-round snow cover. Could it be that they died out when some predator that could distinguish white from dark climbed up that high?

My 6:20 joke about darker possums shining shoes was not intended to be a racial slur and I hope no one took it that way.

I was thinking it would be funny for darker possums to polish and buff black shoes because they could rub up against them (or vortex around them) with their black fur.

I thought the hokey Cockney thing was funny because . . . well . . . just because I think hokey Cockney accents are funny. Think of Dick Van Dyke in “Mary Poppins” crossed with the Artful Dodger in a high school production of “Oliver” and Bob’s your Uncle.

Seriously though, I didn’t mean for that 6:20 to have any racial overtones (or undertones for that matter).